Unlocking Agile Testing

Content

1. Introduction: Agile as a competitive advantage

2. Solving QA challenges

3. The road to Agile Testing

4. Unlock the power of Agile with Jira

5. Complete your Agile toolset with Xray

6. How Xray enables Agility in 5 points

7. Conclusion: Focus on quality from start to finish

2 Unlocking Agile Testing

Introduction

Agile as a competitive advantage

Harvard Business Review Analytics Services dubbed

agile software development as the "competitive
advantage for a digital age."

According to the 13th Annual State of Agile

report, the benefits of adopting agile in testing and
throughout the SDLC have undeniable improvements
on the quality of software, time to market, project
predictability and productivity, cost reduction, and
employee satisfaction.

The Promise of Agile Development

According to PwC internal benchmarks, agile software
development offers big benefits across multiple areas.

Development Goal Improvement with Agile

Quality Defect escapes rates decrease

Time to market Improves 18%-20%*

Productivity Improves 14%-95%**

Cost Reduces costs by 7%-29%

Employee satisfaction Improves 20%-40%

*Wide range reflects industry variations.

**Wide range reflects differing types of software being built

Source: PwC, 2014

Unlocking Agile Testing 3

 As teams adopt agile for managing software
development, tools like Jira Software provide the
foundation for managing projects in an agile way by
promoting collaboration, transparency, commitment
and flexibility.

Agile emphasizes open collaboration and interaction

between team members. When it comes to testing,
agile values testing as an integrated part of the
SDLC, and testers are encouraged to work alongside
developers.

So what does Agile Testing look like and how can

we increase agility in our teams?

In this document, we’ll explore the advantages of agile

testing to meet business goals, the principles of agile
testing, and the tools and strategies you can adopt to
embrace full testing agility and speed.

“Things are moving so fast and users are so much

savvier these days that we need to find ways of not only
shortening the time to market, but also creating
applications that better fit business needs”

Paul Gartner | Vice President, Software Engineering at National Geographic

Source: Harvard Business Review

4 Unlocking Agile Testing

 2
Solving QA challenges
 Solving QA challenges
with Agile Testing
According to Capers Jones survey for Applied
Software Measurement, “85% of bugs happen at the
first stage of the software development life cycle.”

85% 640 X

% Defect injection
Percentage 40 X % Defects found
without Agile Testing
of defects
% Defects found
introduced with Agile Testing
Cost to repair defect

10 X
4X
1X

Coding Unit Test Functional System Release

Test Test

Jones Capers, Applied Software Measurement:

Global Analysis of Productivity and Quality.

Traditional models of testing like waterfall, separate

development and testing into two steps. First the
developers build the features, then the QA team writes
and executes test plans.

As the project grows, the amount of work for the QA

increases and testers usually struggle to keep up with
testing. So what happens? Project owners can choose to
test less and release with more chances of bugs, or delay
the release. This gives the organization a competitive
disadvantage, and increases their chances of costly repairs,
since the cost of catching a bug later in the development
cycle is 40x the cost of finding it during coding.

6 Unlocking Agile Testing

This is where agile testing comes in.

Testing early and throughout development minimizes

the cost to repair a defect, consistently alleviating bugs
by pushing the product through development stages
only when it is working properly.

The goal of an agile development team is to

sustainably deliver new features with quality.

In an agile workflow, testing is an integrated part of

the team and accelerates software development with
higher quality. As a result of this, testers are able to
identify bugs sooner and even avoid them from the
start, saving time and effort.

In an agile workflow:
. Testing is an integrated part of the team and
accelerates software development with higher quality
. Testing happens throughout the whole SDLC
. Testing goes beyond finding bugs
. Its purpose is to build the right product right from
the start by having ongoing conversations between
development and QA

1 2
Develop

Develop
Test

Test

SPRINT SPRINT

Plan Design Deploy Plan Design Deploy

Unlocking Agile Testing 7

 3
The road to
Agile Testing
The road to Agile Testing

The key to more agility starts with having people at the

center of your process and providing them the means
to work together effectively. It’s equally as important to
allow them to learn and adapt, both to their needs and
to the needs of customers.

Being agile requires transparency, continuous

feedback, continuous improvement, and technical
excellence and ownership, to make sure the team
works effectively to produce high quality products.

In order to have a successful agile process, you need

to have these processes/mindsets in place:

Successfully scaling agile includes everyone

Having an agile transformation as an executive-led
initiative is an important start, but the agile mindset
extends to everyone. Developers, testers, marketers
and business intelligence, all need to embrace an agile
mindset for it to truly work.

Testing throughout over testing at the end

Traditional waterfall based teams tend to perform
testing only at the end, after coding/implementation.
Testers need to be involved in discussing/reviewing the
requirements and other issues targeted for the release
or sprint. By having ongoing continuous discussions
with the team, testers increase the shared knowledge
by providing valuable feedback.

Unlocking Agile Testing 9

 Enabling automated testing and continuous
integration
To save time and effort on testing, it’s important to
implement test automation and continuous integration
via a centralized agile platform. This is where a test
management tool that supports test automation is
highly important, to have a single source of truth for
both manual and test automation efforts.

Embracing a tool for communication and

collaboration
Agile teams need tools that support clear and
constant collaboration between developers and
testers. Jira Software is a tool where developers and
testers all work together. This makes quality a part of
development and doesn’t just leave the testing to the
testers. For example: A developer can review tests or
testers can ask for some clarification on user stories.

10 Unlocking Agile Testing

 4
Unlock the power
of Agile with Jira
 Unlock the power of Agile
with Jira
Jira is a project management tool that allows teams to
capture and organize issues, assign work and follow
team activity for seamless collaboration. Jira supports
any type of agile methodology, including Scrum,
Kanban or your own unique mix.

Jira provides the foundation for managing software

projects in an agile way by promoting collaboration,
transparency, estimation, commitment and flexibility.

Jira offers a unique set of features and capabilities

that enable agile development:

. Ability to create test-related issues as new issue

types
. Link between issues (e.g. bugs and requirements)
. Automatic and manual issue assignment
. Integration with source code repository
. Search for and within issues
. Issue comments and attachments
. Agile reports for improved retrospectives
. Ability to import data from other systems

As you can see, Jira is a powerful tool that supports

agile development, but on it’s own, it doesn’t support
agile testing.

This is where Xray comes in.

12 Unlocking Agile Testing

 5
Complete your Agile
toolset with Xray
 Xray is a test management app
native to Jira
4.5 million active users across 5,000 customers use
Xray to manage over 100 million test cases every
month. Almost 70% of our customers are already
agile or are undergoing an agile transformation by
moving out of traditional waterfall scenarios.

Xray uses Jira issues to represent most of the testing

related entities.

Because Xray is a Jira native app, it embraces

agile values and principles and keeps software
development and testing integrated. Xray helps teams
manage their testing activities, including test planning,
authoring, execution, tracking and reporting, all in one
place.

14 Unlocking Agile Testing

 6
How Xray enables
Agility in 5 points
 Complete visibility

Complete visibility

With Xray, you can see what is happening on your

existing agile (Scrum/Kanban) Boards or on your
stories, there’s no need to ask other team members
what they’re working on.

Xray also provides real time testing and coverage

feedback on the issues you’re working on (e.g. Stories,
Epics, Tests) providing you with clear insights into
quality. Users can quickly analyze test results or
evaluate how a Story is on different versions.

16 Unlocking Agile Testing

 Collaboration and communication within the team

Your QA tool should not be isolated from the rest

of the development ecosystem, that’s why Xray
integrates with the software development ecosystem
(Jira).Testers can clarify PBI’s (product backlog items),
assess risks and provide better testing time estimates.
With a unified tool for testing and development,
the activities are blended and team members work
together towards the same goals.

Unlocking Agile Testing 17

 Increased efficiency with Test Automation

Automation will save testers 20-40% of their

time spent on catching errors. With Xray, once
automated tests are properly set-up with
integrations like Cucumber, they can run again and
again. This allows products to glide through testing.
With this solution, teams can focus on what’s
important: fixing those bugs and consistently
delivering quality solutions to their customers.

BDD is an approach where technical and non-

technical users collaborate together to have a
clear understanding of requirements and their
acceptance criteria by writing concrete usage
examples/scenarios in natural language that can
be later on executed by an automation engine.

18 Unlocking Agile Testing

Xray has native support for Cucumber and other
Gherkin based frameworks (e.g. Behave, SpecFlow,
Calabash), allowing customers to collaborate with
the product/development team by writing and
reviewing Scenarios.

Unlocking Agile Testing 19

 Encourages team responsibility for overall quality

The best way to make sure your entire team feels

responsible for quality is to close the gap between
testing and development. Team members work
together in order to achieve common goals: having
features/issues implemented the right way and
working as expected.

To make quality a natural step, Xray provides

coverage analysis capability, allowing anyone to
assess real-time information on whether a user story
is covered with Test cases for example. On agile
boards, where team members manage and track their
progress, everyone can see the status of tests and
contribute to their completion.

20 Unlocking Agile Testing

Adaptable to change

Adaptable to change

You can adapt Xray to the process your team finds

most useful and make them more agile. Use your
team's feedback to embrace changes. Add fields,
customize screens, and take advantage of the many
benefits provided by Jira. Use one or more Test
Plans per sprint to track independently the progress
of different subset of Tests; you can also have Test
Execution on a per sprint level, to manage their work
as any other task.

Unlocking Agile Testing 21

Conclusion

Focus on quality from start to finish

An agile transformation first and foremost starts with

people. When your team embraces an agile mindset,
is open to change, and values feedback, then you
are on the right track.

Project management tools like Jira and Xray

empower each member of your team in their tasks,
encourage open communication, and promote
cross-collaboration.

Together, Jira and Xray close the gap between

testing and development by merging activities
in one tool. This collaboration accelerates agile
software development while testing early and
often, significantly reducing the risk of software
failure.

The result is a focus on quality from start to finish.

Making the move to agile doesn’t have to be

intimidating. Start by embracing the principles of
agile, encourage open communication, and finally,
trust tools like Xray and Jira to support you.

Unlocking Agile Testing 22

Xray is the leading quality assurance and test
management app for Jira. More than 4.5 million
testers, developers and QA managers trust Xray to
manage 100+ million test cases each month. Xray
is a mission-critical tool at over 5,000 companies in
65 countries, including 137 of the Global 500 like
BMW, Samsung and IBM.

Try Xray Test Management

/showcase/xrayapp/

/xrayapp/

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Unlocking Agile Testing 23

 xpand-it.com
getxray.app

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